


Guests in the Burning House

by intoholybattle



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 10:32:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15217247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intoholybattle/pseuds/intoholybattle
Summary: Dean has a vision of the future.





	Guests in the Burning House

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in season five.

A curve of incandescent earth filled the arc of his vision. It was not a whole hemisphere, not the full picture, but it was enough. He knew where the battlefield was. Beyond the faint glimmering ring of atmosphere he observed the gradated blue giving way to dark and the tiny pinpricks of uncountable stars, and his mind was flooded with the realization of how petty it all was.

  
He looked down, feeling that he should fall, and fall like a stone. He knew he wouldn't.

  
The War was all that remained. The center of America was a blackened, gangrenous wound dripping its poisoned drainage over the heart of Dixie, the death and the waste cascading southward through every river and floodplain. The fields of Kansas burned to ash. The ash carried south by floods. Lawrence was probably a crater, now, he thought, and the thought was lost somewhere amid a shrilling in his ears that made Castiel's true voice seem like a whisper. He looked harder and saw the ruined trees laid out like matchsticks in a concentric circle with a diameter of several hundred miles. The west coast was wrong— the shape of it was wrong— and the earth there was shattered like cheap furniture and crushed violently against itself. His mind tried to recover a fact about strike-slip faults from a half-remembered high school lesson, but in the end he couldn't figure out what high school was. He wondered how many people were dead down there.

  
The planet was disappearing behind a shroud of storm and ash. He looked down at the perfect, cloudless eyes of three hurricanes frozen in their advance toward the east coast of the United States. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the tail of another bound for Japan and one for England and knew there were more elsewhere. Across the Pacific ocean in the Philippines all of Luzon was burning and drowning— liquid fire, typhoon chaser. Japan and Hawaii were wastelands in the making, Yellowstone a winking strobe of blue volcanic lightning. He couldn't remember if he'd ever seen the place before in anything but pictures.

  
A fire blazed white in his right hand and the pain was simultaneously the end of him and his salvation, his weapon. He looked over to take stock of it, to measure the heft and range and balance of an unfamiliar tool; his eyes swept over his hand and found it empty, but he knew it held the burning spear. The spear and its flame cast their light into some other dimension, flickering across the rapt faces of a choir of celestial beings that couldn't be described with any insult. The words were small, and never grew in size, in meaning, no matter how many times he repeated them. Some part of him was enraged at the size of words— of every word— in the face of this carnage. This part of him was extinguished in an instant.

  
Thousands of eyes were trained on him, but he couldn't see their owners. Something held his consciousness back. If he met those eyes he wasn't certain what would happen to him. His soul was enveloped in a righteousness and certainty that were terrible. It was someone else's mind— the mind of a god, or of a monster. It was bigger than Kansas, bigger than the oceans, bigger than the earth itself. A gas giant. The crimson tempest spanning continents, eternity. His identity shrank away from it in terror, but his body did not so much as twitch. It belonged to the giant, now.

  
The haze of ruin thickened as he descended. The ground was a nuclear testing site, or a desert on Mars. Somewhere five or ten miles away there'd be a metal sign that read "Stull" buried in a heap of slag. Behind him a portion of the iron cemetery gate was wrapped around a half-uprooted tree trunk, the wood charred and splintered and extruded through the slats from the force of the initial blast. The grave markers had been vaporized.

  
Petty.

  
Outside Lawrence, the wind was dead. Dust fell straight from the sky and settled on the earth like sand at the bottom of an aquarium. His brother was there, three yards away, a shadow in a cloud of cinders falling away in curtains. Sam stood with the ash gathering in the folds of his coat and it was plain that no part of him was harmed. His brow rose in pity and his eyes were glittering and soft, but there was something brutal in them, something absolute. There was a light behind them that was not a human light. It was the joy of an ancient thing that loved this carnage.

"Your heart's not in it, brother," it said, and its voice was not Sam's voice, though Sam's mouth formed the words. They were sure— persuasive. They had the timbre of an obvious lie you couldn't help believing all the same.

He tried to say Sam's name, to coax one last human act out of his hijacked body. But the effigy of Sam was behind him and Dean spun around, the spear searing the phantom flesh of his hand. He hadn't saved him. He hadn't saved Sam, and now he had to kill him. He thrust the point at his brother's face, aiming to gouge out the horrible eyes. But Sam closed the gap, grabbed Dean's wrist, and— smiling a beneficent smile— crushed the bones of his arm in one motion, shouting, "Dean! Dean! Dean!" as if he had built a time machine that worked, as if everything would soon be put right. A black numbness coursed up his arm and to his brain and in the darkness he heard the voice calling out his name with breathless gratitude: "Dean! Dean! I knew you wouldn't fail me." And the world was done.

 

*

 

"Dean. Dean."  
  
Not Sam's voice. His limbs shook. The grip on his wrist was inhuman. A blue light flashed off the knife in his hand and into his eyes, and he flinched. The ringing in his ears was endless. It had always been there.  
  
He couldn't put the right force behind the knife— his palms were sweating. He reached for his attacker's throat with his left hand, the arm unfolding like a whip, but it was met and pushed away with a casual strength that was infuriating. "Dean," the voice repeated, in a monotone.  
  
Something began to resolve itself in his mind. He was in a motel room. Blue shadows enfolded the forms of the beds, the battered furniture, the molding. Some tool in the parking lot had his headlights pointed at their window and the headlights shone in the blade of his knife like moons. His eyes were dry.  
  
"I'll kill you, you son of a bitch," Dean said, the words slurring. A headache blossomed somewhere behind his forehead. His mouth was filled with the complex and repulsive final notes of a monstrous bender. He reflected on alcoholism as a survival strategy, weighed the mental anguish of sobriety against the chances of some freak breaking his wrist in a dark motel at four in the morning. Then he wondered if he might get an opening to grab an empty bottle from the bedside to smash over the bastard's head.  
  
"That would be interesting," said the attacker, though his tone said it would be pointless to try, and not very interesting at all. Dean squinted at him— waited for the puddles of blue and black to become something recognizable— but from the voice alone he already knew it was Castiel.  
  
He really did want to kill him.  
  
The trench coat was a pale expanse of wrinkles in the scattered beams of the headlights. Cas tilted his head at him and furrowed his brow, like this was some kind of science project. _Effects of Looming Apocalypse on Dean Winchester._ The tie loosely hung around his neck was tied on backwards and the label shimmered in the darkness and it was the ultimate insult, the last straw. It took him a moment to find the right words.  
  
"Cas," he said, "if you let go of my wrist, with God as my witness, I will stab you."  
  
"No you won't," Cas said, and let go of his wrist to prove the point.  
  
Dean crammed his eyes shut and let the knife fall from his hand. If he had to go on looking at this prick, the only productive action would be to stab himself.  
  
"Screw you," he said. He threw the sheets aside. There was a lance of pain in his bladder. He worked his face over with his hands and thought about driving his fingers into his eyes. Instead he paced, very slowly, facing the wall so he wouldn't have to look at Castiel. There was a whole conversation here he didn't have the strength to have again. Why are you here? Why are you watching me sleep? He saw the thing play out in his mind— saw the Twilight joke sail over the angel's head. At least Sam would acknowledge it, even if he claimed it wasn't funny.  
  
Sam. Primal fear clawed its way through the hangover and Dean found himself turning, looking past Cas to the other side of the room. Sam was still and silent in the second motel bed. His huge shoulders rose and fell— deep, slow breaths. A minute passed. Dean could feel Castiel's eyes on him, assessing him, assessing his reactions. He wanted to vomit. He couldn't recall the specifics of the nightmare but he remembered that he'd lost Sam somehow, let him slip away into the void. For some reason he thought of ice. An imprisoned creature's eyes alight with malice.  
  
"What did you dream about?"  
  
Dean tilted his head back and covered his eyes. "I dreamed that I aerated your skull with a salad fork," he said.  
  
"Is that some kind of euphemism?"  
  
"I'm gonna hit the head," Dean muttered. "Don't follow me."  
  
The clack of the bathroom door as it shut behind him was the loudest sound he'd ever heard. The final tumbler shelved after last call. No more drinks for him, not for anyone in the universe. He pissed and washed his hands and splashed the frigid water in his face and leaned back against the wall, his red-rimmed eyes watery and alien in the mirror. A parade of self-loathing thoughts marched through his head. He thought of things he could never do again. He remembered his dad smiling over pancakes on a Sunday morning. Mom on the handset in the kitchen, the sunlight blooming into a halo around her golden hair. Eleven-year-old Sammy whining about bad movies on motel TV. The smell of some woman's hair filtered through his lungs and was gone, and he didn't understand how anything could be this bad. His world was already ending. If anything else happened to Sam, that was it. Heat death. All potential gone.  
  
He held his forehead in his hands. He hoped Castiel would leave, and knew he wouldn't. He hoped Sam would survive, and knew he wouldn't. The smoke already filled his lungs.


End file.
